Trigger warning:
this blog contains personal reflections and NOT endorsements, recommendations, advertisements, advice, criticism, admonitions, or censures. It is part of a personal activity of "thinking-through." All representations are merely provisional and are mine and mine alone. Its subject is 'Anglican patrimony'.
(N. B. Many of the posts are quotations or re-posts, as clearly indicated by the hyperlink.)

Patrimony

We deny to claim "any Superiority to ourself to defyne, decyde, or determyn any Article or Poyntof the Christian Fayth and Relligion,or to chang any Ancient Ceremony of the Church from the Forme before received and observedby the Catholick and Apostolick Church."

Norman Simplicity

Wednesday, June 10, 2015

Gestalt

Back when the Church of England still possessed "brilliant men," Dom Gregory invented his "Four Action Shape of the Liturgy," or Offertory, Consecration, Fraction, and Communion. Dr. Tighe succinctly summarizes, as follows:

An important theme concerns the “four-action shape” of the classical Christian Eucharist. The argument runs as follows. At the Last Supper, before the supper Christ took bread, blessed it, broke it, and distributed it. After the supper he took a cup of wine, blessed it, and distributed it. Subsequently, the apostles and their immediate successors combined the “bread ritual” at the beginning of the meal (“This is my body, which is for you; do this for the remembrance of me”) with the “cup ritual” at the end of the meal (“This is my blood of the New Covenant ... do this for the remembrance of me”) and separated them from the meal itself, which continued for several centuries as the “church supper” or “agape meal.” Thus, the Eucharist assumed the form that it subsequently followed in all primitive Christian traditions: the celebrant (1) takes bread and wine, (2) blesses them, (3) breaks the bread, and (4) distributes the blessed or consecrated elements to the communicants.

Dix is pretty down on Cranmer (and I am too, as a theologian, not as a stylist). His disdain leads him ultimately to such provocative pronouncements as this:

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You possess many gifts, but patience isn’t one of them. You’re tough on yourself — and on others. You’re independent, too, and you don’t like to be told what to do. You wish the Church would be a little tighter in discipline. As for the pagans, you’ve pretty much written them off. Sometimes you think the Church would be a better place if you were in charge.